


The Kindest Use a Knife

by Epigone



Category: Oz (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-04
Updated: 2006-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-30 21:29:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Epigone/pseuds/Epigone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Toby, he thinks, oh, Toby. I’ll see you around, Toby. Around, and around, and around.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Kindest Use a Knife

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to apatheia_jane and valmontheights for betas and read-throughs, and to Carmarthen and the good people at linguaphiles (@ LJ) for doing translation and transliteration duty on my proverbs. Title from Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."
> 
> * * *

_So long as you use a knife, there's some love left._  
—Norman Mailer, "Rainy Afternoon with the Wife"

Nightly, Chris dreams of guns. He dreams of firing into the darkness of a forest; of Tarrant shooting him in the chest, the hard bony thump of impact and the drop into Hell. He wakes up horny—the hard-time hard-on. He puts on his pants, he gets up for count, he brushes his teeth.

More than twenty years in and out of the system, he knows how it goes. The routine gets people before almost anything else, before a CO with a grudge or an unlucky fuck with some diseased prag. People can die of the routine in a week, and after that it’s all just brainless reflex until someone finishes them off for real. The only thing surer than the routine is a shank: a blunt in the back, the Gillette that shaves too close. 

In the shower he jerks off thinking about Toby, Toby who kisses him when no one is looking and whimpers his kids’ names at night when he thinks no one is listening. Toby, who hasn’t become routine yet. 

When Chris comes it’s the only surprise he gets all day.

A couple of days after he gets back from the hospital, he’s standing in the shower still shuddering a little, head back and mouth open to the spray of water, when Stanislovsky turns on the showerhead next to him. Stanislovsky cleans himself efficiently and without ever making eye contact, like a cat; like he does everything else. 

Chris is cool and powerful and hollowed-out, and he thinks about how Toby hasn’t wanted to fuck since the kidnapping. He puts one arm against the wall in front of Stanislovsky and leans in.

“Hey,” he says, and smiles down at Stanislovsky’s dick. He lets his other hand drop, into the hot water of the other shower, and then he feels Stanislovsky grab it and hold fast.

When he looks up, Stanislovsky is smiling, too. He says, “The last man who wanted to do this with me? Dead.”

There’s a part of Chris, down at the base of his skull, that stiffens like the beginning of an erection. Stanislovsky’s shower is trickling over his shoulder and down his spine. He keeps smiling, and he says, “You wanna kill me?”

Stanislovsky’s thumb rests in the center of his wrist, where the pulse is faint and deep. After a pause, he lets go and says, “It would be stupid for me to do, for no reason. Dangerous. The more killing you do, the harder to hide.”

“There’re a lotta places to put a body,” says Chris, and winks at him. But he slips back under his own shower, closing his eyes and letting the stream run into the corners of his mouth.

“Maybe,” says Stanislovsky. “People tell me nothing is wasted in Em City. Today’s leftovers, tomorrow’s dinner. They say water never leaves; someone cleans it and pumps it back again, toilet and sink and shower.” In a moment, his shower stops, and Chris can hear his bare feet on the tiles, the liquid noise as he towels off. “In Russia we say, ‘ _Ne plyuy v kolodyets - prigoditsya vody napit'sya._ ’ I think in America you have something like it. ‘What goes around, comes around’?”

“In America, mostly we have things like, ‘If you can’t take the heat, get outta my fuckin’ shower,’” says Chris, swiveling his hips slowly.

Stanislovsky, sounding unamused, says, “I just think about that. Maybe someday I come in here and turn on the shower, and blood comes out. Maybe you think about it, too?” Then the tiles squeak under his feet again, and the door at the far end of the room bumps shut. When Chris opens his eyes again, he’s alone.

He could have killed Stanislovsky. He considered it, the way he always considers it when he’s about to get hard or just finished with it, when there’s still absolute power and detachment. But sometimes it’s not the right moment; and sometimes he doesn’t have a knife on him; and sometimes he’s still thinking about Toby a little, and the routine of arousal and annihilation isn’t quite the same. Sometimes one of the two is enough to tide him over.

Every morning he jerks off, and sometimes, like today, he does it twice. If blood spurts out of the showerhead, this goes in. He isn’t fucking Toby, but this way every morning he fucks all of Em City. Maybe someday that’ll make this—this wanting Toby—as safe and stupid as the routine.

* * *

At lunch he takes an overdone piece of grilled cheese and an apple up to Toby. O’Reily’s under the stairs peddling tits to some black kid, and they give each other quick sideways looks without comment—nothing to see here. When Chris gets to the pod, Toby’s lying prone on the top bunk, facing the opposite wall. Chris looks at him, his hard foreshortened body angled in on itself, and wants him even more than before. He goes over noiselessly, sets the food on the top bunk, and clambers halfway up. He puts his mouth against the hollow of Toby’s knee, tongue and a little teeth in this one remaining soft place.

He can feel Toby stiffen, all the way down his spine like he’s been shocked. Toby kicks out halfheartedly, and Chris steps clear.

“Hey,” he says, “you want something to eat?”

“No,” says Toby, without looking at him.

Chris climbs the rest of the way up, grabs the apple, and puts it next to his head. Toby still isn’t looking, so Chris swings one leg over his body and presses up against his back. Just the barest friction. “Well, fuck, Toby, I do.”

Toby lashes out sideways and knocks the apple off the bed, but he doesn’t try to shake Chris loose. After a moment, he puts his face into the pillow and says, “Fine. So fuck me. I’ll try to hold still for you.”

Chris inches up on him. “Not what I want, Toby. _Look_ at me.” When Toby doesn’t move, he sighs and rolls off, and lies next to him on the narrow bunk. “I brought you an apple.”

“I don’t want it,” says Toby to the pillow, but at length he turns over on his side toward Chris. The skin of his face is swollen, the whites of his eyes faintly pink. “I don’t want anything.”

“Okay,” says Chris. His back is prickling, as if someone’s watching. Maybe everyone is. Maybe a CO’s going to come by in a minute and rattle the glass, tell them to break it up. The thought quickens his pulse so that he can feel it in his ears, and it catches him off-guard when Toby puts a palm flat against his chest. Then his cheek is there, too—a little disconnected from Chris, soft and strange, because Toby’s touching the bandaged spot where the bullet drilled in.

“I just wanna lie here,” Toby says to the little hole in him. 

Even if the COs are making the rounds, there’s still O’Reily and his nice full tits underneath the stairs to hold them up for a while. O’Reily sells a lot of crap, a lot of low-grade crack, because that’s the best most of these dumb fucks know. When Chris was out on the street, he never did any of that shit if he could help it. He did the hard stuff, fast, that left you burned out clean like phosphorus so you could feel the sun shine through you. Sometimes it stuck with you a long, long time; he had a friend who was still going on crazy trips ten years after he quit—like a flashbulb, he would say, snapping right in your face. Times like these, Chris thinks about that a lot, and wishes he were still doing drugs; because it’s times like these that he wants to come back to again and again. Toby’s head burrowing in his chest, Toby talking a tunnel into him.

“Hey,” he says, putting his hand on the back of Toby’s neck, “like that scar, huh?” And when his pulse quiets down enough that he can hear himself, he says in Toby’s ear, “Did you stab me?”

“Tarrant shot you. I saved you. Easy to confuse, though,” says Toby, against his chest.

“No,” says Chris. “I mean the other time. Before. In the supply room.”

Toby leans back to look at him now. “When you were stacking boxes.”

“Yeah.”

Toby’s finger skims the bandage, a faint pressure there and gone. “Did it leave a scar?”

“Of course it fucking left a scar, Toby. Somebody shanked me a couple fucking inches deep. I’m asking was it you.”

It’s the first time Chris has seen Toby smile since he came back from the hospital—since Toby’s kids went missing. It’s not quite the smile he remembers, and he’s not sure if it’s adrenaline or arousal that starts hammering in him when he sees it. He can feel every hair on his head and neck. 

He hopes a CO is watching. He hopes God is watching, just for kicks. Because he’s not going to die for a while longer; Hell’s just gonna have to wait. There are still a couple surprises left for him yet, a couple more crazy off-the-deep-end flashes. He moves in closer, and the blade of Toby’s tongue slips through his mouth, sheer and slick. It’s not as good as being fucked, but it’s the best they can do in a glass room in the middle of the day.

Toby starts shaking after a minute, and pulls back. His kids. Always the kids, always the dead kids between them.

“I don’t remember,” Toby says. “That was a long time ago.”

* * *

Toby falls asleep in the afternoon—awkwardly, half-under the blanket, one arm slung over his face. Chris lies on the bottom bunk looking up, and wondering how it is that the bent slice of Toby’s knee sticking over the edge of the mattress turns him on more than anything else he’s ever seen. After a while it gets to be too much. He hops off the bed and goes over to the door.

Outside, through the glass, Em City rolls slowly and secretly by. It’s been only a few weeks since Tarrant pulled his firing-squad act out in the common area, but already the prison has resettled itself. Kenny’s gone, but the homeboys are still clustered together in front of the TV; security’s a little tighter, but O’Reily’s still running his one-ring tit circus off in the corners, and probably talking at least one CO into looking the other way.

And nobody really believes in justice or mercy anymore, but Father Mukada’s still trying to sell them absolution twice weekly. Jerking off in the shower is starting to feel pretty repetitive today, so Chris gives Toby’s sleeping body one last glance and heads down to the cafeteria.

He waits at the far end of the room while one of the few hard-core Christians finishes up with Mukada; that’s the rule, he figures, like the way you’re supposed to stand back when you’re waiting for an ATM. (It’s theoretical to him: the only times he’s ever been near ATMs have been the times that he’s robbed them.) Most people don’t want you peeking at their sins any more than at their PIN.

When it’s his turn, he saunters down the aisle between the tables and jumps onto the stage, both feet together so that he makes a resounding _thunk_. Mukada looks up at him expressionlessly.

“Hey, Father,” says Chris. “Here I am. I kinda got the urge.”

“To confess?” asks Mukada.

Chris leers and says, “You could put it that way. To spill the beans.” Before Mukada can protest, he drops into the empty chair and intones, “Bless me, Father—”

“This isn’t a joke, Keller,” says Mukada, behind his back. “Confession is sacred; it’s a sacrament. I do this for people who need it.”

“I know that,” says Chris. “I was raised Catholic, y’know, Father. I can name _all_ the sacraments. Baptism, confirmation, confession….” He pauses. “Well, I don’t need to tell _you_ , that’s your fuckin’ job. So I wanna confess.” When Mukada doesn’t speak, he begins again. It’s been ten years since his last confession, he says, and that’s true, and yet he finds the words easily, as though all this time they’ve just been tucked under his tongue like a wafer. Don’t put your teeth in it, someone once told him, or you’ll chew through Jesus; but now he takes pleasure in biting down, grinding out each syllable. He leans back in his chair, wishing he were closer to Mukada so that he could press up against him, and says, “So, I’ve—how d’ya say it?—I’ve had impure thoughts on many occasions.”

In the ensuing silence, he thinks he can hear the rest of Em City buzzing through its daily business on the other side of the wall. At length, Mukada says, “That’s all?”

“ _Many_ occasions,” says Chris. Mukada says nothing, and so he adds, “Father, I wish I could help you out here and say, like, I have committed numerous homosexual acts, but lately I haven 19;t committed nearly as many as I’da liked.”

“Recite the Act of Contrition,” says Mukada flatly. “Although I’m beginning to suspect it’s not going to be genuine, Keller.”

“No, wait a minute.” Chris pushes his chair back a few inches, so that the legs squeak in the empty hall. “I never got this confession shit. All that buildup with the ‘Bless me’ and the years, and then all you want me to say is ‘impure thoughts,’ wham-bam, no real spilling at all. Fuck, everybody has impure thoughts. I don’t feel better just ’cause I admitted it to you. I mean, I go to Sister Pete and we talk about my problems; I go to a priest and we read a script and he tells me it’s all fixed. The fuck is that?”

“I thought you were going to take this seriously.”

“I _am_. I wanna tell you about my impure thoughts so you can really absolve me. ’Cause I have ’em a _lot_.” Chris widens his eyes ingenuously before he remembers that Mukada can’t see him. “Like, I dream the same impure shit every night.”

Mukada sighs, and Chris imagines he can feel his body move in and out with it. “Keller—”

“It’s kinda like a joke, actually,” says Chris, and laughs loudly to make his point. “I walk into a bar….”

It’s a bar up on Eighth Avenue that’s somehow gotten a reputation among Columbia boys looking for something under the radar, and usually he’s the only guy there who’s obviously not one of them. He could fake it if he wanted; over the years, he’s learned how to fake almost anything, and he can do the cultured voice pretty well, can dress like these kids with their old-time money, can move like he’s never been predator or prey. Only he prefers to be the odd man out. It means that the bolder ones come up to him first.

One night in late May, he’s in there wearing a ratty tank and jeans, and he sees the kid coming way in advance, sidling up the counter next to him.

“Hey,” says the kid, who looks almost exactly like all the rest, with an expensive shirt and that thin down-turned mouth of the aristocracy. _Almost_ : because there’s something about his eyes that’s different. Darker. Nervier, and hungrier.

“Hey,” says Chris, returning his gaze to his glass. He saw everything he needed in a glance. He wants this one.

“What’s your name?” says the kid, and Chris looks up at him again. Usually these boys introduce themselves first; usually they think you care who they are. These boys, who’ll cruise bars looking for cheap sex until they graduate, and who’ll move on to arm-candy wives and fuck the little people from their CEO positions for the rest of their lives.

“Tommy,” says Chris. And then—because it’s been two months since the last time he was here, and because there’s something about this minor submission that turns him on—he drops the disinterested act. “How ’bout you?”

“Bryce,” says the kid. 

These Ivy-League boys always have unbelievable names. Chris squints at him and says, “ _Rice_?”

“Bryce,” repeats the kid. He smiles, perfect smile, ten-years-and-thousands-of-bucks-in-braces smile. “Like the canyon.”

They lean on the counter most of the night, their elbows getting mixed up together in the little cemetery of empty shot glasses between them. Bryce grew up on the Upper West Side, old family, old money, old connections, practically in the shadow of St. Paul’s Chapel, and then when college acceptance letters came out, something went wrong. The connections failed somewhere. Instead of Columbia, he ended up at Fordham University.

“Good school,” says Chris. “Catholic, right?”

“Good school,” says Bryce in a thick voice. Chris looks at him and thinks about how numb his lips probably are at this point, his tongue. How much friction it’s gonna take to bring ’em back to life. “Not Columbia.”

“Fuck Columbia,” says Chris, slurring on purpose. “Why’re we hangin’ around all these _Columbia_ boys? Let’s go.”

He knows exactly where they’re heading. Sitting up close behind him on the motorcycle seat, Bryce puts his head on Chris’s shoulder and yells, “Never been on one of these before!” and Chris thinks, Yeah, bet you haven’t, babe. The ride is long, and Bryce, pressed against his back, is warm and wide open. The city lights disappear almost an hour before Chris finally stops and kills the engine. They stumble out into the trees, into the dark, and Bryce just flops down and pulls Chris after, wide, wide. When Chris fucks him, lying on a swell of the soft ground, he looks down and sees nothing. He goes as deep as he can, until the kid groans and begins to move under him, falling away. Bryce, like the canyon.

“Then what?” asks Mukada, after a silence. Chris turns, and Mukada’s already screwed around in his chair, looking back.

“Now it’s not a confession anymore,” says Chris, grinning, “not if you’re looking at me.”

“Eye contact has nothing to do—”

“Whatever,” says Chris.

“What happened to the boy, Keller?”

“How do I know? That’s when I wake up.” Mukada’s staring at him, tight-mouthed, so he gets to his feet. “Now I feel better. _That_ ’s a confession, see, Father?”

“Get out,” says Mukada.

He obeys with a wink, gratified. But the long walk out of the cafeteria is almost painful, because he’s still horny, still taut and straining for it. He’s so hard that for a second he thinks he’s still got that gun stashed in his pants.

After he was finished in the forest, after he’d done everything he wanted, after the night contracted again around the soft _whump_ of the bullet like water closing over a stone, he’d just looked. The kid’s eyes were still open: those perfect prescription eyes, deep and dead, in which Chris saw nothing but himself, over and over. He had an urge to scream into those eyes and listen for an echo ricocheting back. Chris, Chris, Chris. Like the canyon.

* * *

He spends the rest of his day keeping one step ahead of stir-crazy. An hour in front of the TV, a couple of hours in the computer room, a long hot weight session in the gym. When he comes into the pod, damp and sore, it’s almost time for lockdown. Toby’s examining himself in the mirror, his face pushed close.

Chris comes up behind him and puts his arms around Toby’s waist, leans his chin on Toby’s shoulder. “What’s goin’ on?”

“Just looking,” says Toby, and his voice is very, very level. 

“Looks good to me,” says Chris, and presses his lips briefly to Toby’s neck. He glances up at the mirror to see Toby, glassy, staring out at him. There’s a red groove slanting down his left cheek, where his arm must have lain in sleep.

“Wishing Gary looked more like me,” adds Toby. “Wishing I looked more like Gary.”

Chris squeezes him tighter and says, “Toby. You’re gonna see him again.”

“They cut off his _hand_ ,” says Toby.

“Don’ mean shit,” insists Chris, into the soft short hairs of Toby’s neck. He’s not stupid: he’s pretty sure Gary’s dead. He knows these things. And so it’s weird that he feels a kind of sadness about it all; mixed with longing, with closeness, with jealousy. He reaches forward and takes Toby’s nearest hand in his own. It hangs there, dumb weight. In the silence, they hear the thud of hundreds of bolts slamming into place as the CO in the guard tower locks them down for the night.

Chris says, “They’re gonna let him go.”

“No, they’re not,” says Toby, and tries to turn and face him. Chris moves in closer, so that his knees pin Toby’s legs against the sink.

“They’re gonna let him go. He’s gonna get out.” He’s kissing along the faint ridge of Toby’s spine, submerged like an underwater mountain range. “You’re gonna get out.”

When Toby’s hand slips out of his and swings back, bumps up lazily and almost accidentally between his legs, it surprises him. Toby, again, surprises him. He leans in more, against the pressure, and Toby’s hand takes hold of him and starts moving, slowly, up and down.

Breath hitching, Chris murmurs, “Swear to fuckin’ God, Toby, this is the only way I’m gettin’ out of here.”

“I know,” says Toby. “Okay.”

They stand, Chris against Toby against the sink, Chris’s chin still resting on Toby’s shoulder. His body knows two things: the heavy stroke of Toby’s hand through his clothes, and—because he’s been here before, because he’s spent more than twenty years in and out of the system—the minutes ticking down until a guard swings by for headcount.

Not that he needs to do anything to hurry himself along. He’s been waiting all day to be touched by a hand other than his own. He’s already loaded and cocked. He triggers quickly, and when he comes his head rocks back a little, its reflection skittering across the mirror. For a minute he revels in it, letting his eyes roll up, but when he looks back down they’re still standing together in the mirror, Toby in front.

Toby lets go, and Chris kisses his neck again. He can feel Toby start to flinch under it, and then relax. 

“You’re welcome,” says Toby, and leans into him momentarily. Then he nudges past and hauls himself up onto his bunk.

Chris wanders over to the door and looks out, bringing his breathing back under control. For a long time he doesn’t think of anything at all. The next time he blinks, he’s lost hours: Mineo’s finished with the headcount and back up in the guard tower. He’s not hard anymore; he’s over it; and now he can think of killing. He can stare at himself in the glass door and see, gathering behind him, Bryce and Byam Lewis and Mark Karachi, and other men whose names he doesn’t know. He can smile and say to them, to this line of past and future corpses: COUNT, BOYS.

LIGHTS OUT.

In the darkness, he turns. Toby lies with his arm over his face, leaving another mark. He looks asleep, and Chris wants him like he’s never wanted anyone before. He wants to have him everywhere on the outside: beyond the city limits, against the wall in an alleyway, in the back of a car. Mostly, though, he wants Toby in Toby’s house. Wants him on the living-room sofa, on the bed where his wife once slept, in the shower.

He’s not gonna kill Toby; but he is, because he’s gonna love him, and that’s what love is for. It sticks deep and fast and without mercy, and draws out the dying longer than anything else. Toby’s gonna get out, but not that far. He’ll go back to his old life in his old house, only there’ll be something of Oz left, like the imprint of his sleeping arm across his face.

Chris walks across the floor, stands up on the balls of his feet, rests his head against the top mattress. It’s quiet.

“Toby?”

“Yeah?” whispers the voice near his ear.

“Did you stab me?” he asks. He won’t ever see the inside of Toby’s shower. But maybe someday Toby’ll step in, alone, and when he turns on the water he’ll get a surprise. Maybe blood will come out. Maybe Chris’s.

Toby laughs. Laughs. And then he says, “It could’ve been me.”

“It _could’ve_?”

“If it were me, that’s how I would’ve done it.” 

Chris pauses. “In the supply room?”

“Nah.” Toby lets out a long breath. “I mean, not like Tarrant. Not with a gun. With a shank, in the back. That close.”

“Yeah,” says Chris, and his scalp is tingling, and the soles of his feet. “I know. Don Juan.”

 _Toby, Toby, Toby, Toby_ : no matter how many times he thinks it, the word still means something to him. It’s so quiet. He can hear the echoes of everything he will ever do. Toby, he thinks, oh, Toby. I’ll see you around, Toby. Around, and around, and around.

“Don Juan,” agrees Toby, hidden by the overhang of his arm. “Deep as it could go.”

“I know,” says Chris again, and he does. Penetration to the core. That’s how it has to be with them. That’s how it’s always been.


End file.
